Facebook investigates left-leaning group

News for Democracy backed by billionaire and Democratic donor

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's co-founder and chief executive introduces 'Home' a Facebook app suite that integrates with Android, during a news conference in Menlo Park, California in this file photo taken April 4, 2013. Facebook Inc introduced video for its popular photo sharing application Instagram in an attempt to go to head-to-head with rival Twitter. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith/Files (UNITED STATES - Tags: BUSINESS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY TELECOMS)

Washington Post

Facebook said it is investigating whether an organization backed by billionaire and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman violated the social media giant’s policies when it set up a series of misleading news pages in a bid to target voters with left-leaning political messages.

The probe focuses on News for Democracy, whose Facebook ads and affiliated pages about sports, religion, the American flag and other topics were viewed millions of times during the 2018 congressional midterm election, according to an analysis of the company ad archive conducted by New York University.

News for Democracy’s potential violations may have included Facebook’s community standards and advertising policies, the company said.

Facebook’s community standards emphasize authenticity and ban “misrepresentation,” including coordinated efforts to mislead people about the origin of content.

Some of News for Democracy’s pages inserted Democratic messages into the feeds of right-leaning voters, according to a review of Facebook’s ad archive.

“People start to trust the content emanating from the page because it appeals to their interests, and once there is a certain degree of trust, you can start to pivot by slowly adding in kernels of disinformation or overly politicized information that lacks context,” said Benjamin Decker, research fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, who called such tactics an “intentional act of deception” that mimicked strategies of Russian operatives around the 2016 presidential election.

During the 2018 midterms, News for Democracy helped create at least 14 Facebook pages and purchased the ads that ran on them, according to a person familiar with its operations who was not authorized to speak on the record.

While the ads, cached in Facebook’s public database, show that News for Democracy paid for them, the pages themselves — which are listed as news companies — do not disclose their backers or offer any identifying information beyond their name.

Washington Post

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